FAQs

Frank U. Hess is the author of the business novel The Decision and the originator of OCM (Operations-Centered Maintenance). He was co-founder of T.A. Cook before he sold the group to Accenture. Currently he is Chairman of Vysr and works with maintenance and operations teams to replace dead-end performance with reliable, repeatable results. He writes and consults under the banner of The EZ Asset Management Company.

It's a business novel about an aging petrochemical complex which stands on the brink of shutdown. The young controller Palina Sawyer faces the greatest challenge of her career: she must control production losses, drastically reduce cost, and save employee morale from collapse. To get this right, she must make the right decision. Does she pursue cautious, incremental improvements, or take a bold leap with fresh, independent ideas that many may initially reject? This story of Operations-Centered Maintenance is based on real life events. It details Palinaʼs struggle to stand her ground against entrenched ways of thinking, bureaucratic structures, tight budgets, and management consultants. Together with a team of craftsmen, technicians, and engineers, she sets out to prove that a new understanding of maintenance - strategically planned and organized across departments - can save Eagle Ridge and its more than 700 jobs from downfall.

The acronym OCM stands for Operations-Centered Maintenance. At its core, OCM focuses on the value contribution of asset management to production. The OCM concept breaks with traditional models such as RCM by questioning the unilateral focus on reliability as a "silver bullet." Instead, OCM drives a paradigm shift in industrial maintenance. It emphasizes that the root cause of inefficiency lies not within the assets themselves, but rather in flawed human decision-making. Through its six core principles, OCM shifts management focus toward a new mindset, guiding organizations away from reactive firefighting and toward sustainable performance.

Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) focuses on selecting the right maintenance tasks for each failure mode of an asset. It's more an engineering-driven approach to maintenance.

OCM (Operations-Centered Maintenance) starts a level up: it looks at the decisions an organization makes around its assets and aligns its whole capability – people, strategy, and routines – to the performance the operation needs. In Frank's words, "...most problems are not caused by the assets themselves, but by the wrong decisions made around those assets."

Vysr is a software company which offers a performance-mining platform for maintenance organizations that helps teams find where reliability and cost are leaking and decide what to do about it. It is the applied, software side of the OCM methodology – the place where the thinking in the book and the courses becomes a working strategy.

The six principles of OCM are::

• Think Zero-Based
• Act Demand-Driven
• Be Forward-Locking,
• Are Prescriptive
• Check Instantly
• Lead Strategic
  

ZBM is revaluating all maintenance activities from a clean slate to ensure every task delivers justifiable value to production. It‘s more a new mindset than a tool. It can compromise topics from zero-based budgeting to zero-break-ins. Zero-based maintenance organizations implement zero based budgeting and planning processes to enable prioritization and optimization of risk mitigating actions at a site level and aligned with the asset strategy plan.

Focuses on the alignment of maintenance schedules and resource directly with actual production demands and operational requirements. In times of low production demand maintenance is able to reduce their effort and cost compared to high production demand where maintenance secures 100% availability. Demand-Driven Maintenance is a data-based model to connect maintenance cost with the required availability targets of a production area.

The Forward-Locking Maintenance approach secures and stabilizes the future operational windows by proactively analyzing and driving maintenance activities to prevent reactive disruptions.

Prescriptive Maintenance utilizes advanced analytics to not predict failures but to prescribe specific, actionable solutions and operational adjustments. It turns the mainly engineers-driven backwards-looking approach to predicting potential future problems by describing operational activities.

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Instant Benchmarking is a real-time approach within Performance Mining continuously analyzing and measuring operational data to uncover hidden inefficiencies, process bottlenecks, and opportunities for optimization. Instant Benchmarking emphasises, that benchmarking is not a project - yearly or twice-yearly executed - rather than a permanent management tasks, excuteable on demand at any time.

Strategic Asset Management ensures that all asset management objectives are seamlessly synchronized with overarching business goals and corporate strategy. As a resulot the strategy is summarized in a Strategic Asset Management Plan (SAMP).

HRO is a concept that defines specific requirements for organizations operating in highly complex, high-risk environments that manage to function virtually error-free over long periods. According to researchers Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, this management model is built upon five core principles:

• Preoccupation with Failure: Even the smallest deviations and near-misses are analyzed immediately to prevent catastrophic failures.
• Reluctance to Simplify Interpretations: Complex problems are never dismissed superficially but are thoroughly scrutinized and questioned.
• Sensitivity to Operations: Leadership and teams maintain continuous awareness of real-time conditions and day-to-day frontline operations.
• Commitment to Resilience: The capacity to rapidly absorb unforeseen events, adapt, and maintain operational continuity.
• Deference to Expertise: During a crisis, decision-making authority shifts away from formal hierarchy to the individual with the highest situational expertise.
  

Yes. Frank delivers keynotes and runs workshops for operations and maintenance audiences, drawing on the OCM framework and the stories behind The Decision. You can request a keynote or a custom program through the For Business section of this site.